left wing

Every now and then I get hate mail. Most of it is innocuous. The person sending it just doesn’t seem to have much of an avenue to spew their dislike of what we do here at United Liberty. They’re rarely threatening, but almost always hateful. They’re never looking for a discussion. However, the e-mail I received yesterday shows how off the rails the left can get:

Republican Nazi pigs do not impose your shit Christian lifestyles at my children. I personally pray someone with a bushmaster goes into your place and opens fire and many die. That is my wish.. Pigs, Pigs Pigs. Did your mama have any children who lived? You all need to crawl, back into that nasty space you all dripped out of from some B—ach’es Vaginata/ Pigs, all of you Southern inbred creeps. Burn in hell and quit asking for money in the name of Jesus and God. You are the epitome of everything that is not American. I hope you and all your children die along with you.

Over the last few years, I’ve heard the left talk about how hateful conservatives can be. Being a libertarian, there have been plenty of occasions where I disagreed with conservatives in discussions on social issues, but I’ve never at any moment gotten to the point where they were berating me or wishing harm upon me.

Needless to say, I’m strongly considering sending this one to the police since the e-mail address, which I’ve left off the post, is from a legitimate account.

That’s according to a new study that indicates that highly educated people often believe that they’re left-wing while in fact holding more right wing positions on key issues. Sciencedaily.com has the write-up that is really pretty interesting. From the report:

A new study from the University of Leicester Department of Economics reveals that highly educated people make wrong assumptions about their political leanings — they are more likely to think they are left wing when they are more likely to be relatively conservative.

The study suggests that some people may end up voting for left of centre parties because they hold the mistaken belief that they are left wing.

The research by Dr James Rockey, a lecturer in Economics, used data from the World Values Survey and described the opinions and characteristics of 136,000 individuals, in 82 countries, over a period of over 20 years.

His study, Who is Left-Wing, and Who Just Thinks They Are?, analysed whether people misperceive their relative ideological position by measuring on a scale from 1 to 10 what people think they are — and measuring their opinion against a substantive issue ie how income should be divided.

“The most startling result is that the more educated tend to believe that they are more left-wing than they are measured as being,” said Dr Rockey. “That is, well-educated individuals are more likely to think that they are quite left-wing but actually believe things that compared to the rest of the population would make them comparatively right-wing.

As if to illustrate that those on the Left are just as capable of irrational, insane and downright bizarre comments as Pat Robertson and the Religious Right, Danny Glover suggests in this audio clip that the Haiti earthquake was a response (by Mother Nature, God or somebody) to the failure to address global warming at Copenhagen.